Too many people have waxed eloquently on the sheer beauty of the graphics in Ecco the Dolphin for me to need adding them here. If you are not inclined to play through a complicated game with difficult puzzles, I would still recommend you buy this game and find a walkthrough so you can open all the levels and bask in sheer computer-graphical and musical beauty.

The game fulfills the second major criterion for gaming excellence - it has real originality in the way the story is related and the puzzles you have to solve.

Listening to some of the music is a marvellous aesthetic experience of its own. A tip for existing players/owners: If you completed the main part of the Roaring Forces level, you will have ended up in a small chamber which you have to do one small thing to get out of. This is so easy I'm quite sure that most gamers have just passed straight through in not more than two minutes. Don't do that - the music for this small segment of the game is a superb, ethereal 6-minute choral piece which is absolutely worth listening to on its own merits. For an even better effect, move "Ecco" to the middle of the chamber - the camera switches to long-shot mode and slowly circles the chamber, focussed on the centre and "Ecco". Because of the nature of what happens in that chamber, you can stay there without drowning. An unforgettable experience.

My one quibble with the game is the climactic confrontation with the foe - ie the last playable chapter of the game. This was an utter disappointment. The penultimate chapter is complicated and difficult to achieve and in every way suitably builds up your anticipation of the final chapter. But the final chapter itself ... it's not that it's too easy to figure out, it's not that it's too easy to achieve - neither of those are the case. But it completely lacks all the essential requirements for a final boss-fight. The environment is not notably stun
ning, visually (not like Hanging Waters, say, Lost Atlantis or even Shrine of Controversy) and the "boss" and "enemies" have no personality by their nature. There isn't even any music! (In a game which has up to now provided a stunningly apposite score for almost every situation Ecco faces, this sudden absence of music was a major let-down.) I've gone on about this at length in the hope that someone at Appaloosa will see it and ensure it does not happen with any further versions of the game. I had to go back and play some earlier parts in order to remember how good it *had* been - the ending nearly ruined the whole game for me.